Quotes from Jayne Anne Phillips

I don't do much rewriting, because each paragraph is very carefully put together.

Character and story are suggested by the voice in the words themselves.

If death is this brilliant slide, this high, fine music felt as pure vibration, this plunging float in wind and silence, it's not so bad.

I think we really forget how connected we are to the past.

Talk between women friends is always therapy...

Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for death, and for every (other) transformation human beings encounter.

Then he's inside you, and your body remembers, each time, every man, even if you try to forget.

The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language.

Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war's insistence everyone move on.

If all stories are fiction, fiction can be true -- not in detail or fact, but in some transformed version of feeling. If there is a memory of paradise, paradise can exist, in some other place or country dimensionally reminiscent of our own. The sad stories live there too, but in that country, we know what they mean and why they happened. We make our way back from them, finding the way through a bountiful wilderness we begin to understand. Years are nothing: Story conquers all distance.

Despite membership in the guild of outcasts, writers do, by quirk of fate or sex or addiction or parenthood, become intimate with others, with those who don't originate from the planet of words and language. Other things do happen, but we don't know what they are until we write about them, or think about them in words, or remember them in phrases. - From "Why She Writes

A song moves a story fast or slow like the river moves the water.

I love you the way I love nightmare, secrets coming up like smoke through a grid, the way I love mirrors shattered but still whole, reflecting the foolish image in a hundred lit-up fragments. No one else could take me, pay my way with what your skin knows.

older, I've got a clear space around me I didn't have before. I wonder if that's like a future, or a place where a future will be.

There's always been a wild quiet about Solly. It stays in the air near him like a scent.

Termite can imitate almost anything," I say. "Things just sound more like music in his version. Sounds instead of words.

Termite likes music without words, and he falls asleep surrounded.

The afternoon has closed down, gone purple, coaxed and sucked dark by the storm.

Gene Autry riding into coral skyline while the cacti stand up ancient and timeless

it was like fucking an electric zombie, a stiff-legged gazelle shuddering in northern catatonia.

and the slapping feet of the men that follow the box. They have no faces and they feel with the whiskers of dogs.

If death is this brilliant slide, this high, fine music felt as pure vibration, this plunging float in wind and silence, it's not so bad.

I think about going away myself, living a whole different life, like I could exist on a different planet and this life wouldn't know about me, and I wouldn't know about it.

Sheet music circles on the water, silent, open pages, weighted and wet. I train the beam of the flashlight over the words. "Meet Me in St. Louis" drifts by, and "My Funny Valentine.